2006-04-18

Wow, to think it was 100 entries ago when you read Post #100, Baby! What a crazy difference 100 posts make. As you recall from that post (or can find it you go read it), I randown the posts that caught my eye in the previous 99 entries. I'll do that below. I'll also update the website updating statistics which I found so illuminating the last time.

In March I posted 72 times in 31 days, for an average of one post every 0.43056 days (ie. 10 hours, 20 minutes, 0 seconds). That's...wow. That's just crazy.

In April so far excluding this post but including my previous 32 posts in 16 days, 19 minutes, I've averaged one post every 0.5308 days (ie. 12 hours, 44 minutes, 24.38 seconds).

Definitely picked up on the post frequency, despite a severe finger injury that limited my typing for 2 weeks.

Also remember the average on posts 1-99 was a post every 19 hours, 51 minutes, and 55.1515 seconds.

Now leading up to the 199th post I've made 200 posts in 126 days, 14 hours, 40 minutes (182320 minutes) this means a global average of one post every 916.1809 minutes -- 15.2697 hours. So on average, every 15 hours, 16 minutes, 10.85 seconds you should be stopping by this blog to read the new posting.

So what does that mean the average is for the past 100 posts? Only 64320 minutes elapsed between the 99th and 199th post, which means in that span a post occured every 10.72 hours. In the second 100-post era we're talking new content on this blog every 10 hours, 43 minutes, 12 seconds.

So when should you check? Every 19:51:55? Every 15:16:10? Every 10:43:12? Even sooner for the third 100 posts? I can't say, though I will caution that a slowdown is going to occur in less than a month...it should fall under the perview of the 200-299 post era, but if the current acceleration† of posting speed continues then the next update would occur 35059.85 minutes from now. That would be a mere 24 days 8 hours away, putting another of these updates scheduled for Friday, May 12. I doubt it, but you never know.

† I am of course using a block-style linear progression, which isn't really proper for the extrapolation of an acceleration. I simply declared that since 64320 is about 54% the size of 118000 (the previous number of elapsed minutes) and 35060 is about 54% the size of 64320 it would be a reasonable place for the progression. However, the acceleration due to time is likely not constant. The proper way to calculate it all would be to make a pseudo-graph of the postings as they occur in timespace. That is, treat the minute-times as positions in relation to the smooth progression of posting number. Then a formula describing these plots (or roughly describing them, MatLab is fairly good for this sort of thing) could be ascertained. The first derivative w.r.t. posting number would give you the frequency of the posts, and the second derivative would then give you the speed increase of that frequency. Using it one could then extrapolate all sorts of neat things. But that's a whole lot of work!

New FeaturesI thought it a good time to look over a few of the new things that were done on this blog in the 101-199 post range. I debuted a fair number of "innovations" that shouldn't be overlooked:

Colours: That's right, I decided to be bold and try out colours for the blog. I early on had a vague idea of colour conventions, but eventually that all fell by the wayside. My "colour convention" for covering baseball trades might be used again, but more or less I'm using red and blue colours for the same basic purpose: an additional form of emphasis when bold or italics or large fonts just don't seem right. I also use green relatively often to sorta-highlight a word that can be read as normal text with no real loss.

Footnotes: Sometimes used as footnotes and sometimes as endnotes, originally I came across them as a handy way to add interesting points about baseball players I had in my draft list without making the list lose its clean look. I've since used it for the purposes of ordinary text as well...I even used it in this posting.

Sticky links: During my failed attempt at promoting my now-defunct fantasy baseball league I put a "sticky link" to the baseball pool posting on the sidebar, between where my profile and my links dump is located now. Obviously with the baseball season started I've since pulled it out again. Another handy element is that the old posts during that era no longer show the sticky link, letting me direct traffic to posts for time-specific purposes.

Okay, I admit it... 2 1/2 innovations were all I had come up with. Lists (ordered and unordered), font size, and image posting had all been done. Apparently not else is possible with Blogger.com software as it currently stands. So I won't be doing keywords or anything like that anytime soon. Probably not a huge loss anyways.

Best ReadsBut I can effectively use keywords for this section, as I rundown highlights from the past 100 posts:

Comedy:

I addressed International Women's Day 2006 by explaining an easy way for Laurie Blakeman's Liberal Party to acheive an increase in the number of women in the Alberta Legislature. I also covered some areas where women in various nations around the world are still struggling for important rights.

I had an extensive writeup of The Miracle on Grass (or Shale, as I would phrase it), when Canada beat the United States 8-6 in the first round of the World Baseball Classic. In fact, I have not found a single evaluation of that game in more detail than I presented it here. I not only covered the game itself and the players itself but also gave some hints to what Canada could expect in the game they played against Mexico the next day. In fact, the media talking heads all disagreed with most of what I said, only to have my predictions turn out to be accurate. Ahh, if only they listened to me.

A Calgary Imam is trying to get the Western Standard into a lot of trouble with a human rights commission. I not only present a detailed analysis of the complaint to the Human Rights Kangaroo Court but also indicate the true crime of Ezra Levant and what it says about the Imam and about his religion. Much slandering and insensitive commenting takes place. I promise you'll love hearing what I say to him.

On the subject of Ralph's retirement and the meteoric rise of Preston Manning in the polls for Klein's replacement, its a good time to re-evalutate my contention that Alberta needs a drinker to lead her in the next millenium. Rationale for this curious belief is given, along with a couple of examples of why alcholism is something a politician should give you for free along with dishonesty and vanity.